EURASIA. 5 



with high, narrow, Aryan shoulders, a contracted chest, and a 

 stoop. He almost invariably inherits the straight black hair, soft 

 dark eye, flat cheek-bones, and full curved lips of his Indian fore- 

 bears, with varying shades of complexion, from what is distin- 

 guished with difficulty from the sahib's to what might easily pass 

 for the pure native's. Occasionally, with one parent or even both 

 of dark color, one sees the anomaly of a little fair-haired, blue- 

 eyed child, a whimsical legacy from a bygone generation. Here 

 the "tar-brush" is more painfully in evidence. There is a dingi- 

 ness about the yellow curls and a dullness in the blue eyes, a 

 smudginess in the general effect, as if Nature had finished her 

 work with a dirty palette. And the brothers and sisters of the 

 pitiful little freak may be as brown as sbisham-wood. 



It will be seen that it would be easy, if desirable, to convict 

 Mrs. De Souza of her mixed origin in a variety of ways, however 

 " fair " her comely visage. But there remains her East-Indian 

 voice and " accent." It is so marked that if we met Mrs. De 

 Souza in London or New York, more elaborately costumed per- 

 haps than she appears from my window, it would throw about 

 her speech the halo of amused interest which a foreigner's al- 

 ways evokes. We would guess at her nationality; though, un- 

 less we were retired Anglo-Indians, we would never hit it. To 

 the rest of us she might have been originally French, or Span- 

 ish, or almost anything. It would be only the old " Qui hai " 

 who could detect and pounce upon the dulcet " chi-chi," the lan- 

 guage of Eurasia. It is English, of course — soft, rapid, nervous 

 English. It is so quick, that the words seem to click against 

 one another as they come ; but they never run together ; on the 

 contrary they are extraordinarily distinct. There is little disagree- 

 able twang, but there is a great deal of unlooked-for inflection ; a 

 rising and falling of tone where we would go monotonously on, 

 which gives almost a picturesque effect to the words, until one 

 tires of it. The sentences are apt to terminate with a certain 

 abruptness ; there is absolutely no drawl at the end of them. An 

 odd importance, which is yet not emphasis, is given to the final 

 syllables we tend to slur, and there is an almost invariable tendency 

 to double final consonants. " Kindlee step thiss way," says the 

 young woman behind the counter. " Thiss is verree prittee — and 

 eh ip too onlee one rupee ae yard." The baboo speaks English in 

 exactly the same way, and it is the common fear of the " country- 

 bred," the pure European born and brought up in India among 

 the hills, to acquire it. It is fatally easy to imitate, though ex- 

 tremely difficult to transfer to print, and makes one reason the 

 more why Anglo-Indian children should be early sent home to be 

 educated. Pleasant enough while it is novel, it soon becomes 

 objectionable to European ears, doubtless as a matter of asso- 



